Vatican urges faithful to revive efforts for sainthood cause of Cardinal Van Thuan

 

Vatican City, Sep 21, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

The beatification cause of Venerable Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan is receiving renewed attention from the Vatican 50 years after he was first imprisoned by the communist government of Vietnam, according to the cardinal’s sister.

Elisabeth Nguyen Thi Thu Hong, Van Thuan’s youngest sister and last living sibling, told CNA that the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints is encouraging Catholics to revive their efforts toward the cause as it launches a new webpage devoted to the Vietnamese cardinal, whose meditations on hope and forgiveness have inspired Catholics for decades.

The next stage in the canonization process “is up to the faithful … to pray to God through the intercession of the cardinal to get an approved miracle,” Nguyen said during a visit to Rome this week.

An official at the dicastery for saints confirmed to CNA the department is working on Van Thuan’s cause and reiterated the importance of a verified miracle for the process to proceed.

Van Thuan — declared venerable, the step before beatification, in 2017 — was a prisoner of the communist government of Vietnam for 13 years, spending nine of those in solitary confinement. His spiritual messages, smuggled out during his imprisonment, were collected and published in the book “The Road of Hope: A Gospel from Prison.”

After he was freed, Van Thuan was forced to leave his home country, spending his final years in Rome where he served at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. In 2001, Pope John Paul II made Van Thuan a cardinal.

Van Thuan was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer soon after, but four months before his death on Sept. 16, 2002, he made a final visit to Australia to see his family for his mother’s 100th birthday.

Witness of hope in God

Nguyen, the youngest of Van Thuan’s nine siblings, has written about her brother’s witness in the book “Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan: Man of Joy and Hope,” coauthored by Father Stefaan Lecleir and published by Ignatius Press in April.

After writing the book, Nguyen said she was glad to contribute to the glory of God through sharing her brother’s life: “Especially in these recent times in our society when there’s so much anger and not accepting to forgive … I decided to write with Father Lecleir about the fact that [Van Thuan’s] message is really to forgive and hope in God through God’s love.”

Nguyen attended a Mass at her brother’s tomb at the Basilica of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome on Sept. 16, the anniversary of his death. The Mass also marked 50 years since his arrest and his composition of the spiritual messages that became “The Road of Hope” — immortalized in a newly-discovered photo of the Vietnamese cardinal from 1975.

The photo, which shows Van Thuan writing at a table in 1975, was taken by a man who served at the house where the bishop was under house arrest in communist Vietnam. A friend of Nguyen found it hanging on a family’s kitchen wall in Vietnam.

‘A mini dad’

Nguyen, who was a baby when Van Thuan was ordained a priest, said for her he was “more than a brother; he was like a mini dad.”

She shared some of her memories of her older brother, including the influence his clandestine letters had on her life and faith journey.

“For a long time, I never wanted to write [about Van Thuan] because it’s going back to some darker times,” Nguyen said.

She described Van Thuan as a very attentive son and sibling who always made time to visit his family or to write during his long imprisonment and subsequent exile.

Following the Vietnam War and the North Vietnamese Army’s invasion of South Vietnam, Van Thuan’s parents and most of his siblings fled to Australia, Canada, and the U.S.

In a postcard he sent to his parents in Australia in 1982, Van Thuan wrote to inform them of the recent death of two of their relatives in Vietnam. He added: “I am in good health. I pray for you and mom each day. This year, our village, Phú Cam, celebrates 300 years of becoming a Catholic village. Let’s pray a lot for each other.”

As a young man, Van Thuan would help watch over his baby sister, Elisabeth. As she grew up, she cared for his pet guinea pigs and birds. Nguyen recalled the loving guidance her priest-brother gave during her school years.

‘Are you happy?’

Growing up during the Vietnam War made Nguyen cynical about the goodness of God, she said, and in her young adulthood, she “turned away from the Church because I said, ‘God is love, but look at all of this atrocity and death in the family, and the whole country is really in pieces.’”

But her older brother, more than two decades her senior, was instrumental in her return to belief in the Catholic faith, she explained — starting with when she was finishing her master’s degree in philosophy at Sydney University in Australia in 1974.

Her master’s thesis was on the existentialist philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Van Thuan read the thesis to give her feedback, at her request. Because he was visiting Australia for a meeting with bishops, they had a chance to meet to discuss it.

“He said, ‘So you found the way for life now? Are you happy?’” Nguyen recalled. “And I burst out crying, because I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I said, ‘I’m still searching, but what am I going to do now? I’m done with the thesis, I can’t go back now.’ He said, ‘No, professors accept freedom of thought. You can go and tell them, ‘I thought I really believed in this, but now that I’ve written it, did all the research, I’m not happy.’”

“He never condemned me or was judgmental,” she noted.

The following year, the Vatican named Van Thuan, already the bishop of Nha Trang for eight years, archbishop coadjutor of what was then known as Saigon. Shortly afterward, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army and in August, Van Thuan was arrested by the communist government.

In 1979, he was transferred from a reeducation camp to house arrest, which is when he began to write messages on the back of page-a-day calendar leaves and sneak them out through a local boy, Nguyen told CNA.

Nguyen was captivated by the strength of faith she encountered in her brother’s letters. He “wrote a meditation on the logic of the cross, and that really, really [moved] me,” she said.

She was struck that he seemed to have met Jesus so deeply. “I need to find out what that’s like, to be able to meet God like him,” she thought. “That’s the one who changed my diapers, that’s the one who took me to the candy store.”